Posted on June 13, 2010 at 11:54 pm

Where are your clothes? It’s admirable the attention you’re drawing to the nation’s education crisis, and that $4.35 billion purse of yours is nice. But you need to stop making it rain like Adam “Pacman” Jones at the Spearmint Rhino and start putting that money to work.

I know you’re a basketball guy, so let’s hit some analogies. You’re acting like Jerry Buss trying to buy his Lakers a championship in 2004 by breaking the bank for over-the-hill Hall of Famers like Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Doesn’t work that way. Ask LeBron.

You need focus and hunger fueled by desperation.

Case in point: It took a few years in the desert—and the eventual additions of Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol—for Kobe to return to the Promised Land. Dude was up at 3:30 to get in his game-day workouts, and even after getting his fourth ring—less than a year after his gold medal—was back in the gym working on his post game in hopes of repeating (Reverse jinx: Paul Pierce makes me happy).

Mr. Duncan, these are desperate times; we’re hungry for reform.

But the right kind of reform. A meritocracy based on standardized test scores and a push toward charter schools is smoke-and-mirrors. It looks good on the surface (polls love union-busting bombast), but what are you really effecting?

There are some 5,000 charter schools enrolling nearly 1.5 million students, or about 3 percent of U.S. public school students, and they have attracted the support of many politicians, philanthropists, and foundations. But charter schools vary widely in quality. Some are excellent, some are abysmal, and most are in-between. On average, they have not produced better results than regular public schools. Charter schools have been compared to regular public schools on the national assessments since 2003, and they have never outperformed regular public schools. Charters in Boston and New York City have gotten positive evaluations, but they typically have smaller proportions of the students who are hardest to educate–those with limited English and those with disabilities–than regular public schools.

Now, I won’t totally knock the effort, for now just the energy. It’s unfocused. Like a hyped-up Nate Robinson banging threes then drawing a technical foul because he can’t settle himself. That’s why he’s good for a mid-game burst but gets yanked in the crunch. Same with charter schools.

As their numbers grow under pressure from the Obama administration, their quality is not likely to improve; the history of American education is replete with small-scale demonstrations that became less effective when rapidly expanded to a mass scale. So, if history is a useful guide, charters, which are by definition very thinly regulated, will go from being no better or worse to being a very problematic sector riddled with extreme variability in performance and not infrequent cases of financial mismanagement.

Think on this, who’s going to teach in these charters? Closing down public schools is going to leave a lot of teachers in search of work. And to keep down class sizes, charters are going to be hungry and desperate for help. They’ll also need administrators, so much so that who’s to say they won’t hire principals and deans from poor-performance schools.

But let’s say the charters bank on their ability to more easily eliminate poor educators and hire the freshly fired, reasoning that if it doesn’t work it, they can just replace them. This might work for a while, but eventually you’re the Clippers burning through draft picks. Eventually with whom do you replace these busts? Being a teacher doesn’t have the job security it once did. California alone is in the midst of laying off over 23,000 teachers this year. Not the most effective recruitment tool.

over the next seven to ten years we will have to replace nearly 100,000 teachers — or about one-third of the workforce — due to retirement alone. But there’s more: after years of flat or declining enrollment at the elementary level, schools across the state can expect to see 170,000 new elementary students come through their doors in the next five years.

In the meantime, that decade-long window could serve as on-the-job training with outgoing teachers serving as mentors, like Steve Nash apprenticing Goran Dragic. A farm system would also keep with the hungry and desperate angle: We starry-eyed Millennials are hurting for work and primed to perform. Will some among us lose our idealism and bail? Yeah. But the loan forgiveness part of the program means you’ll get a few years out of us, and as situations improve so will our stamina.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s one that looks to solve the problem rather than repackage it as a solution like you’re currently doing. Why not look into the matter, Mr. Duncan? Consider it your summer homework.

2 Comments to “PETERSON: An Open Letter to Arne Duncan”

I agree with this quote you cite: “the history of American education is replete with small-scale demonstrations that became less effective when rapidly expanded to a mass scale.”

So how is it that the solution can be a centrally-administered “farm” program for teachers? (…Mr. Secretary, we need some fresh legs in the game, and these teacher-training programs are like drafting from a Calipari-coached team. On your dime, why not convert them to a farm system of sorts?”)

I think we can both agree that whatever education reforms are implemented, they need to reduce the standardization of education (ie, get rid of NCLB and let states/counties decide how children are educated). Or if we’re staying with the national model, schools should be judged/funding allotted by how many of their graduates go on to to college/enroll in vocational programs and are employed X years after graduating — then it would be easier to target underperforming schools.

I don’t think that a farm system is a panacea by any means, but I think it would provide a better means of managing teacher quality. As much as it is a training program, Teach for America also functions as a research institute that will eventually be able to control for certain criteria in developing quality educators (I’ll remain in the shallows here because this is an angle I’m in the process of expanding). Therefore, expanding over time the role of Teach for America and its cousin programs like NYC Teaching Fellows would be a systemic solution. The increase of retirements over the next decade will necessitate a flood of new teachers; why not ensure, to the extent possible, that those new teachers are the right teachers?

I want to add that I don’t think Tfa and the like should abandon their efforts in traditional public schools; these efforts offer valuable experience and information. But the push toward eventual replacement with charters requires foresight to prevent the dilution brought on by mass scale expansion. As the expansion progresses, the window for effective and efficient change shrinks.

In terms of the standardization of education, this is something I’m still looking into because it is such an encompassing topic, especially with the recent push for national standards, of which I am currently a tentative advocate. I agree that NCLB has proven ineffective, but its replacement should not be just that. Standardized testing is not the answer but could be an element of it, if employed intelligently; this is currently not the case. The evaluation of schools also poses no easy remedy. Communities play a large role in a school’s effectiveness and should too be taken into account, as should parents and local governments and local colleges and local vocational programs and local businesses. All these entities stand to profit a student/school success, so as they are involved, they are responsible.

For example, in a fictional town in which an aluminum company is the largest employer, why not have that company invest in local school science programs (sponsoring science fairs, hosting field trips, conducting Saturday classes and summer camps in conjunction with a local vocational school). Not all the students will end up working for the company or attending the vocational school, but a good many might and they will be exceptionally prepared. The same too for local governments who will cultivate a better engaged citizenry with more invested in a municipality’s success.

I’m actually trying to secure interviews with officials from TfA and the Teaching Fellows on these points for future posts, so please, anyone, submit ideas for topics/problems/solutions/questions/answers/insight/foresight/hindsight/etc. This has become a gestating bailiwick of mine, one that grows deeper with the dive.

On a personal note, Michele, I’m deeply disappointed in your team choice. I thought you were a good person.

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